Fear & Running

We’ve published dozens of dog stories in our pages over the past decade. There was the amazing tale of Taz, a 3-year-old mutt that saved his owner, ultrarunner Danelle Ballengee, after she’d been stranded in the Moab Desert. There was the border collie that ran a 3:24 marathon (my PR!), and the soup-to-nuts nine-page guide on how to run with your dog. A range of runners, from Scott Jurek and Deena Kastor to Susan Orlean, have been photographed with their pooches for these pages, and the most popular Editor’s Letter I’ve ever written was about putting my beloved black Lab down after a great 14-year run. Dogs are a fun, feel-good part of our mix—and of many readers’ running lives.

Unfortunately, there is another side. Our October 2012 issue contains one of the most harrowing stories we’ve ever published. It recounts the awful autumn afternoon last year when Richard and John Garritson, two young brothers in California, were attacked by six pit bulls while on a trail run a mile from home. The story is harrowing not just because of how terrifying and gruesome the attack was but because it taps into a dread that is deep-seated in many runners. “I don’t know what it is,” Alberto Salazar told John Brant, who wrote our story on the Garritsons, “but the fear of being ripped apart by a dog is worse than any other.” When Salazar trained with the Greater Boston Track Club, Bill Rodgers used to carry a heavy key ring on long runs and one day threw it at a huge dog that was on the attack. “I just froze,” Salazar said. “I remember thinking that this dog was going to kill me. Bill saved my life that day.” Most runners have been there, our reverie crashed by a charging, growling hound that seems to think that since we are running, we are prey. Mercifully, we are spared at the last moment by an electric fence or a shouting owner or bark-but-no-bite second thoughts. The Garritsons weren’t so lucky.

The story is also controversial, because of the question of liability (Were the dogs at fault? Their owner?) but also because some will see it as fear-mongering or more evidence that running is unsafe. Unfortunately, terrible things can happen when we are out running, just as they can when we’re driving to the grocery store. There’s nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise. But what makes this story more than just harrowing is that the Garritsons are part of an epic running family. They’ve been training and racing at a high level since they were children, which gave them the strength, courage, and dedication to each other they desperately needed that awful afternoon.

This is another recurring storyline in RW: runners who survived horrible events because they were runners. There was Matt Long, the New York City firefighter who was run over by a bus and, according to his doctors, survived only because he was a marathoner and an Ironman. There was Gilbert Tuhabonye, a track star in Burundi who was nearly burned alive by warlords and survived only because he ran, through the night and through searing pain, to safety. These stories are extreme and frightening, but also reassuring. They remind me that even if the unthinkable happens, the fact that I’m a runner just might be what saves me.

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David Willey is the editor-in-chief of Runner's World. Follow him on Twitter @dwilleyRW.

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